“Taking Back Our Time”

By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

October 22, 2006

I’ve noticed that when we in this congregation ask each other, “How are you doing?” or “How’s your week been?” - - whether in casual conversation or in the check-ins we do with one another at the beginning of many meetings - - the most frequent response we give one another is “busy.” Not “fantastic,” “awful,” “good,” “bad,” or even “so-so,” but “busy.” I say it plenty myself.

I know the reason that most people, not only in this church but in this country, are so busy is because of work, or to be more accurate, because of overwork.

Americans now work more hours per week and more weeks per year than they did fifty years ago, and more than citizens of any other industrialized country. This overwork is having negative affects on our physical health, our mental health, our marriages, our families, our communities, and our environment. The situation is so dire that this Tuesday, October 24, is “Take Back Your Time” Day in the United States and Canada.

I know that there are economic, political, and psychological reasons for overworking in this country. I’ve talked about these extensively before and probably will do so again in the future. However, to quickly summarize, the main economic reason for long working hours in this country is that while productivity has increased steadily over the past 50 years, most Americans have traded that productivity for more money rather than more time. If any of us were willing to live at the same standard of living as most people did in the 1950s, we could do so working only about 20 hours a week, which wouldn’t be a bad idea since the average level of happiness in this country is the same as it was in the 1950s despite having a lot more buying power and a lot more stuff today.

The main political reason for long working hours in this country is that we do not have universal health, and the only way that most Americans have access to health care is through full-time employment. Since benefits represent so much of many employees’ total compensation, it’s also cheaper for employers to pressure employees into working long hours than hiring additional employees.

The main psychological reason for long working hours in this country is that most Americans look to their jobs as such an important source of their self worth that many of us willing to accept long working hours in exchange for the recognition, the boost to our egos, that our work provides us.

Until any of these three things change, most Americans will probably continue to have long working hours.

However, I’ve come to believe that something else is going on too.

You see, I notice this constant busyness not only among families with two working parents, but also among individuals of all ages and family situations. I even notice it among those of you who are retired, those of you who have worked hard all your lives so you wouldn’t be so busy now, but you’re still busy.

It seems as if busyness has become the norm in our society, and that many influences in the society in which we live - - not only the three I mentioned before - - are colluding together to keep us constantly busy, encouraging us to fill up every minute of every hour of every day with some kind of activity.

This worries me. It worries me when I hear so many among you telling me that you had a busy week, not just this week but the week before too, and you think next week will be busy as well. It worries me because this is a lousy way to live life, the one precious life that each of us has been given. I know that when I am overly busy I am less caring, less compassionate, less grateful, less accepting and forgiving, and less hopeful, and I suspect busyness has the same affects on many of you.

In addition to everything I’ve mentioned up to now, I think one of the things that keeps us busy is the way we think about time itself, and I want to tell you about a recent experience that has given me a new way of thinking about how we think about time. At first, it may not seem like this has anything to do with how we think about time, but bear with me.

            You see, there’s a really nice buffet brunch that I recently discovered. It’s called the Calcutta Grill, and it’s at a country club in Newcastle. I don’t spend a whole lot of time hanging out in country clubs, but when Hiromi’s parents came this past summer, Hiromi and I decided that we would take them someplace special to celebrate Hiromi’s father’s retirement. When we arrived, I was glad we had brought them. The restaurant had a beautiful view of Seattle, one the best views of the city I’ve discovered. It also had a fantastic buffet brunch.

            But buffets of any kind have always been a challenge for me. I think they are for many of us.

            I remember when I was living in Tokyo. There was a Pizza Hut near a school where I was teaching. (Yes, there are Pizza Huts in Tokyo). This Pizza Hut had an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. As much pizza as you could eat for less than 1,000 yen, which was a bargain.           

            I learned that Japanese and Americans thought differently about this deal. I asked some Japanese friends how many pieces they would typically eat at this all-you-can-eat buffet. “Two pieces,” they usually said. I asked my Americans friends the same question. I got a different answer. Most of my Americans friends felt as if were their moral duty to eat as much pizza as possible at this all-you-could-eat buffet, and if they didn’t, they had somehow failed to take full advantage of the deal and hadn’t gotten their money’s worth.

            And I admit, I was thinking similar thoughts when I walked into this buffet brunch with my wife and in-laws.

            Yet there were so many choices. Fresh crepes. Made-to-order omelettes. Steaming prime rib. Sushi. Eggs, bacon, sausages, fruit, pastries, assorted pastries, a dozen different deserts and more.

            And I wanted it all.

            But then there was that still, small voice within in me that said, “Even you have limits.” And I knew it was true. There have been times in my life when I have been known to be a prodigious eater. When I was in St. Louis this past summer, a group of colleagues took me out for a birthday dinner. I said I wanted to go out for traditional St. Louis barbecue. Afterward, one of them said to me, “I’ve never heard any body order a full slab of ribs with a half of chicken as a side dish.”

            However, I knew that this buffet offered more choices and even more food than even I could handle. I knew that my eyes were bigger than my plate, even if the servers regularly put out fresh plates.

            I knew that amidst this vast smorgasbord of food, I could either carefully choose a few things that I really wanted, or I could pile too much on my plate, not be able to finish it, feel guilty about leaving leftovers, not having room for dessert, and end up not enjoying the whole experience after all.

            What does any of this have to do with how we think about time?

            In many ways, I think life for many of us today is a lot like a big brunch buffet. We’re overwhelmed with choices and possibilities about how we spend our time, and we have a hard time saying no to anything.

            Like me at that buffet, I think many of us have unrealistic expectations of ourselves. We don’t pay very good attention to our limits. In fact, I think we sometimes outright lie to ourselves about how much we can or should accomplish or get done, and we put too much on our plate. As a result, we feel rushed. We feel overwhelmed. We feel guilty about what we don’t get through or don’t do well.

            And just like there’s a danger of not having room for dessert at a buffet, when we put too much on our plate timewise, we crowd out “the desert” from our own lives - - sleep, time with family and friends, downtime, time for ourselves.

            If any of us are going to do a better job of spending our time, I want to suggest that an essential first step is being honest with ourselves about our limits, about realizing that there are limits to our time.

            I want to suggest that an essential second step is learning to say no.

            As many of you know, if all goes well, sometime this year Hiromi and I hope to travel to Colombia to adopt a child, and it’ll probably be about a month long trip.

            As a result of this, I’ve been turning down a lot of invitations to do things, especially things outside the church. I’ve turned down request to serve on a national UUA committee, I’ve turned down several outside speaking engagements. I’ve turned down invitations to participate in other activities. I’ve turned down an invitation to teach a course at Seattle University.

            The whole adoption process has been like a “get out of stuff” free card.

            Now I have to say that most of these are things that I really would have liked to do. Most of them are things that are important, and I’ve often felt bad about saying no to these invitations.

            On the upside, however, I feel slightly less crazy and “time starved” this year than in past years. There are actually occasional blank spots in my schedule, which I really, really like.

            I recently read about a woman named Kathy. After Little League baseball for her 11-year-old son Josh reached a fever pitch of scheduling one year, she and her husband said, “Enough.” Family dinners were vanishing. Evening and weekends were spent on the road and at ball fields. With two working parents, another son’s activities to schedule, and a community with overcrowded highways, baseball was pushing everyone to the edge.

            Kathy and her husband decided to reclaim family time by not enrolling their son in Little League. But when the new season started, they discovered that they had violated a community standard for good parenting, as evidenced by the shock and dismay of other Little League parents. When Kathy told another mother at the local supermarket about her family’s decision, the stunned neighbor replied, “Can you do that?”

            The answer is, yes, we can say no. In fact, to sometimes we must.

            I know that a lot of folks in this church now involved in social justice are struggling with all the pressing needs they see in our community and in our world. It’s important for all us to remember what Hazel Wolf, a longtime Seattle social justice activist said on the eve of her 100^th birthday. 

            “You can’t solve all of the world’s problems,” Hazel said. “You have to guard against taking on more than you can do and burning out with frustration. But you can take on one project at a time, and then another. You can do that your entire life.”

            So we have to reclaim our own limits. We have to learn how to say no.

            I want to suggest that a  third thing we need to learn how to do is reclaim the value of down time, of doing little or nothing, or at least nothing useful and develop the practice of setting aside this kind of time in our lives.

            Why we do we need this kind of time? First of all, I think we need this kind of time just to rest. None of us are Energizer bunnies. We aren’t meant to be on the go seven days a week. The composer Claude Debussy once said, “Music is the space between the notes,” and just as a musical score needs rests, our bodies, our minds, and our spirits need rest.

            We also need this kind of time to slow us down and give us time to remember and reflect. The novelist Milan Kundera writes, “There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.” We need time to reflect on our own lives, to make sense of our lives. We need this kind of time in our lives for the same reason sentences need punctuation marks. Without occasional stopping points, our lives start to resemble one, long run on sentence that don’t make sense anymore.

             I know that without stretches of uninterrupted time in my life, there are questions that I would never ask myself, questions that take a long time to bubble from my unconscious mind into my conscious mind, important questions that otherwise would remain lost in unremembered dreams.

            I know that without stretches of uninterrupted time, there are questions that Hiromi and I would never have, because sometimes it takes a long time to have an important conversation.

            We also need this kind of time not only to reflect on our lives but to gain perspective on our lives, to examine them. The philosopher Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living, but we need time to examine our lives. To use a metaphor that’s become popular recently, sometimes you have to get off the dance floor and go up to the balcony to get a perspective on your life, and to do this you need to stop dancing for a while.

            We also need this kind of time to let spirit back into our lives. As Unitarian Universalists, we may have different names and understandings for this, but I think we all experience it, this spirit that makes us feel alive again, that makes us feel connected again, that makes us feel whole again, that brings peace to our souls. And my experience of life tells me that when our lives are overly full, this spirit doesn’t have room to enter, but when we leave spaces in our lives, it does.

            Most of all, we need this kind of time just to enjoy life itself. I’ve always thought the line that we are human beings and not human doings was kind of corny, but there’s truth to it.

            From the Jewish tradition, comes the tradition of Sabbath, of having one day a week of rest. In Exodus in Hebrew Scripture, the rationale for the Sabbath to give all of humanity a chance to remember, reflect, and enjoy the beauty, wonder, and awe of the creation itself.

            Rabbi Arthur Waskow writes that “this tradition was rooted in an earthy sense of sacred work as well as sacred rest. Indeed, the tradition taught a rhythm, a spiral of Doing and Being in which the next stage of Doing would always be higher and deeper, because a time of Being had preceded it, and in which we could bring a fuller, more whole self to Being because we had Done more in the meantime, and in which both the Doing and Being were more holy because we had integrated them into a balanced life path.”

            Today, different sects of Judaism interpret what activities are prohibited on the Sabbath differently, but in general there is a prohibition against any kind of “useful work.” Some stricter understandings of Sabbath prohibitions include not using any kind of electric or electronic devices. No exchange of money is another prohibition.

            But certain kind of activities are also encouraged on the Sabbath. Slowly prepared, slowly eaten elegant meals. Walking in nature. Spending time with family and friends. Play. Simple games. Reading. Singing. Praying. Making love.  Taking naps.

            I have often wondered if we as Unitarian Universalists should not consider taking the practice of a Sabbath more seriously, not because it is ordained by any book, but because it makes good sense.

            So to summarize, three things we need to do to think differently about time…acknowledge our limits, learn to say no, and learn to set time aside for doing little or nothing.

            Life is too short to spend it always feeling busy.